An ear for reproducing everyday language has long been David Mamet's hallmark, and he has now employed it to skewer the dogmatic, puritanical streak that has become commonplace on and off the campus. With Oleanna, he continues an exploration of male-female conflicts begun with Sexual Perversity in Chicago in 1974. Oleanna cogently demonstrates that when free thought and dialogue are imperiled, nobody wins. In Oleanna, John and Carol engage in hand-to-hand combat that amounts to a primal struggle for power. As usual with Mamet, the vehicle for that combat is crackling, highly distilled dialogue unencumbered by literary frills or phony theatrical ones.